For seven months the fate of young Elian Gonzalez gripped the attention of the American public as a prolonged legal battle wound its way through the courts.
The battle also impacted on US-Cuban relations at a time when the Clinton Administration was trying to move slowly towards normalisation but the powerful anti-Castro lobby among the Cuban exile community in Miami became more strident against any concessions.
However, the influential Cuban-American National Foundation based in Miami has now been dealt a serious blow with the decision of the supreme court yesterday not to interfere in the decision of the lower courts to send Elian back to Cuba.
For the Cuban exiles, it was virtually unthinkable that a US government would return Elian to a communist dictatorship from which the boy's mother was fleeing when she was drowned last November making the 90-mile passage to freedom in Florida.
Elian was rescued by fishermen off Florida after 48 hours floating in an inflated tube.
The Miami relatives of Elian soon applied for political asylum for him although he was only six-years-old and his father, Juan Miguel, was demanding his return. The legal battle of the past months has been over whether the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) had the power to reject the asylum petition on the grounds that his father had the prior claim on the boy.
The refusal of the relatives to hand over Elian to his father in spite of an INS order resulted in a night-time seizure of the boy on April 22nd. The photograph of a terrified-looking Elian in the arms of the man who rescued him confronted by an armed Border Patrol agent went around the world and caused outrage in Miami.
But once Elian was reunited with his father at a rural estate outside Washington, there were more pictures showing the boy clearly happy to be with his father, step-mother and stepbrother.
However, a federal court had ruled that Elian was not free to return to Cuba until the appeals procedures were exhausted. This is why the Miami relatives continued to lodge appeals although it was becoming clear that the courts did not uphold their petition for political asylum for a six-year-old who did not understand what this meant.
Being a presidential election year, it was inevitable that the Elian case would get caught up in politics. The Republican candidate, Governor George Bush, followed the party line that it was a custody case that should be decided by a family court.
When his opponent, Vice-President Gore took a similar line instead of backing President Clinton and Attorney-General, Ms Janet Reno, that Elian should be given back to his father, he was accused of seeking the Miami Cuban vote in his campaign.
By next November when voters go to the polls, the Elian saga will have long faded in the rest of the country, but not for the Miami Cubans.